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Decorated notes are attached to one of the crosses remembering the 85 Camp Fire victims at a makeshift memorial at the town limits in Paradise on Dec. 21, 2018. (Karl Mondon — Bay Area News Group file)

Pacific Gas & Electric, Corp. announced on Monday that it will plead guilty to criminal charges following the Camp Fire, including 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter. It’s an unprecedented admission for a corporation that has brought “mixed feelings” to some of the victims’ families.

PG&E reached the agreement with the Butte County District Attorney Mike Ramsey, who has been investigating the fire with the help of a year-long grand jury. PG&E CEO Bill Johnson is scheduled to appear in a sentencing hearing on April 24. The hearing was delayed from this week because of the COVID-19 outbreak.

The corporation said it would admit to 84 counts of involuntary manslaughter and one count of unlawfully causing a fire, with three “special allegations” for injuring a firefighter, injuring more than one person and burning multiple structures.

The official death toll is 85, but one of the deaths, a suicide, could not be proven to be linked to the fire, said Ramsey.

That’s the largest death toll a corporation has admitted guilt to since BP agreed to 11 counts of manslaughter in the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion. PG&E was already a convicted felon for its role in a gas pipeline explosion in San Bruno.

The corporation will also pay a fine of about $3.5 million and $500,000 to reimburse Ramsey’s office. As much as $15 million will go towards restoring access to water for residents along the Miocene Canal, which was damaged in the fire. That will start as soon as possible and continue over the next five years.

“We thought this was a significant, unprecedented and historic prosecution,” said Ramsey. “It should be viewed as holding this utility absolutely criminally responsible for the loss of all of our friends and families in Butte County and also putting PG&E in a position where they could not deny at all that their negligence resulted in the Camp Fire.”

He noted the “extraordinary sacrifice” of the Butte County Grand Jury that indicted the company. The 16 people on the panel had been working since March 2019 in secrecy, without telling even loved ones or employers. They listened to 100 witnesses and reviewed over 1,400 exhibits and produced over 6,000 transcript pages, which remain sealed.

Ramsey gave a heads up to families of the deceased in a private briefing on Saturday, according to his press release.

Wally Sipher, whose sister Judith Sipher died in the fire, said he had gotten increasingly angry with PG&E as more facts about the utility’s mishandling of its equipment came to light. He was glad to hear about the decision over the weekend.

“I’m glad that that there’s a little justice here,” he said. “It was just over the top negligent.”

Tammie Konicki, who lost her mother Sheila Santos, said she heard about the agreement on the news Monday morning. She said she has “mixed feelings” about the admission of guilt.

“When I found out I broke down crying,” she said. “I’m not sure if it was because we have closure, or anger because they knew about it for how many years, and I don’t have my mom.”

She said she had 15 family members lose everything in the fire and scatter across the country.

He also said that there had been earlier discussions about charging a much higher fine, in the hundreds of millions. But that could have “killed” the corporation and put the claims of tens of thousands of victims in PG&E’s bankruptcy court at risk. PG&E has agreed to a $13.5 billion settlement with victims, which is expected to be distributed later this summer.

“We thought it was important to maintain PG&E’s structure,” he said.

Johnson, the PG&E CEO, said in an interview his goal was to “make sure the victims get paid as quickly as possible and rebuild as quickly as possible.”

He said he had been to Paradise around five times. On a tour with Ramsey, he listened to 911 calls. He will be confronted directly with victims and victims impact statements at the sentencing hearing on April 24.

“I think this will be an emotional and difficult experience for everybody,” he said.

Camille von Kaenel covers Camp Fire recovery. She is a corps member with Report for America, a national non-profit organization that helps fund local journalists. She's happy to be back hiking the hills and mountains of her home state of California.